Slashdot Mirror

One of Google's top minds in artificial intelligence has joined Apple in a director role. Ian Goodfellow said on his LinkedIn profile that he switched employers in March. He said he's a director of machine learning in the Special Projects Group. CNBC reports: Goodfellow is the father of an AI approach known as generative adversarial networks, or GANs. The approach draws on two networks, one known as a generative network and the other known as a discriminative network, and can be used to come up with unusual and creative outputs in the form of audio, video and text. GAN systems have been used to generate "deepfake" fake media content.

Goodfellow got his Ph.D. at the University of Montreal in 2014, and since then he has worked at OpenAI and Google. At OpenAI he was paid more than $800,000, according to a tax filing. His research is widely cited in academic literature. At Google Goodfellow did work around GANs and security, including an area known as adversarial attacks. People working on AI at Apple have previously done research that drew on the GAN technology.

An anonymous reader quotes PC Gamer: Not too long into a 168-hour VR marathon session, Jak Wilmot admits the monotony got to him. Wilmot, who is the co-founder of Disrupt VR, also says this experiment is "quite possibly the dumbest thing" he's ever done. So, why do it? For science, of course. I can't imagine immersing myself in a virtual world for a full week, nonstop night and day. Wilmot did it, though, for the most part -- he allowed himself 30 seconds to switch VR headsets when needed, and 30 seconds without a headset on to eat, if required. Other than those small breaks, he spent every other moment in VR...

There doesn't seem to be some big takeaway from this experiment (aside from, perhaps, don't drink coffee while playing VR), though one thing I also found interesting was his integration back into the real world when the experiment was over. "I have never appreciated the smell of outside air so much. One thing we cannot replicate is nature. We can do it visually and auditorally, but there is something about the energy of outside that is amazing," Wilmot observed.
PC Gamer calls it "probably at least partially a publicity stunt. But it's still interesting to see how donning a VR headset for an extended period of time and essentially living in virtual worlds can mess with the mind." Wilmot wore VR gear while working -- and even while showering (with the VR gear protected by plastic), blacking out his windows so he couldn't tell day from night, calling it "a week in the future..."

"I almost feel like I'm in my own 500-suare-foot spaceship," he says at one point, "and I'm really missing earth, and I'm missing nature." Early on he also reported some mild claustrophobia.

You can watch the moment where after seven days he removes the headset and returns to conventional reality, joking "Oh my gosh, the graphics are so good." He reports a slight disorientation as his eyes catch up with real ilfe, and says it changed his perspective on people in the real world, seeing them as "individuals in one collection, one environment -- as avatars."

"Blockchain developer" is the top emerging job in the U.S. -- according to data published in LinkedIn's 2018 U.S. Emerging Jobs report. From a report: [...] Using data gleaned from the LinkedIn Economic Graph, which serves as a "digital representation of the global economy" by analyzing the skills and job openings from across 590 million members and 30 million companies, LinkedIn found that "blockchain developers" has grown 33-fold in the past four years. In this case, "emerging jobs" refers to the growth of specific job titles on LinkedIn profiles in the period between 2014 and 2018. It's worth noting here that "blockchain" didn't appear anywhere in the top 20 emerging jobs in 2017, while "machine learning engineer" topped the list last year -- it's in second place this year.

Ryan Holmes, writing on Medium: Back in March of last year, Conde Nast Traveler did something a little unusual in the social media universe. They played hard to get. Instead of courting new followers with clickbait and promo codes, the company required that interested people apply to get into their closed Facebook Group, focused on female travelers. To be considered for membership, applicants had to explain why the Group was important to them, and show an understanding of the community guidelines. Today, the Women Who Travel Facebook Group counts more than 50,000 members. And it boasts a level of activity many brands could only dream of -- three-quarters of users are active on a daily basis. The initiative has been so successful, in fact, that Conde Nast has since extended Facebook Groups across eight of its brands, including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Allure, BRIDES, Golf Digest, SELF and Teen Vogue.

The Facebook Group is nothing new. Spaces for like-minded people to congregate and discuss specific subjects -- from hobbies to pets and celebrities -- date in one form or another to the platform's earliest days. These Groups have long been segmented into three classes: open (or general admission), closed (requiring admin approval for new members) and secret (invisible to outside search and accessible only with a direct link). But for a combination of technical and cultural reasons, Groups are suddenly having their moment. (Apart from Facebook, LinkedIn revamped its own Groups offering this fall for its 500-plus million users, adding the ability to share pics and videos, as well as receive comment notifications.) In the past year alone, Facebook Group membership is up 40 percent, with 1.4 billion people -- more than half of Facebook's massive user base -- now using Groups every month. Of those, 200 million people belong to so-called "meaningful Groups," considered a vital part of users' daily lives.

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist, New York Times best-selling author, and The Wharton School's top professor, says Americans should work two hours less. Instead of the typical 9-to-5, people "should finish at 3pm," says Grant in a recent LinkedIn post. "We can be as productive and creative in 6 focused hours as in 8 unfocused hours." CNBC reports: In the LinkedIn post, Grant was weighing in on an Atlantic article about the time gap between when school and work days end, a bane for many parents. But it's not the first time Grant has given his stamp of approval to less work with more productivity. "Productivity is less about time management and more about attention management," Grant tweeted in July, highlighting an article about a successful four-day work week study. For the study, a New Zealand company adopted a four-day work week (at five-day pay) with positive results; the company saw benefits ranging from lower stress levels in employees to increased performance. In a recent blog post, billionaire Richard Branson also touted the success of a three-day or four-day work week. "It's easier to attract top talent when you are open and flexible," Branson said in the post. "It's not effective or productive to force them to behave in a conventional way."

"Many people out there would love three-day or even four-day weekends," said Branson. "Everyone would welcome more time to spend with their loved ones, more time to get fit and healthy, more time to explore the world."

An anonymous reader writes: I know PHP isn't to some devs liking, but chances are you know people who work with PHP or have sites that are built with it. PHP 5.6 and 7.0 are shortly coming to the end of the support period for security patches, so what plans have you made to migrate code and sites to newer platforms? With apparently huge numbers (80%) of sites still running PHP 5.6, there appears to be little industry acknowledgement of the issue. Is there a ticking PHP Time Bomb waiting to go off?

"Suddenly, calls and texts went unreturned," writes LinkedIn's editor at large, describing a recruiter who suddenly discovered the candidate she'd wanted to hire failed to respond to 12 messages, including emails like "Please let me know that you have not been kidnapped by aliens. I'm worried about you," and even a snail-mailed greeting card. Recruiters complain that prospective employees are now borrowing a practice from dating -- and "ghosting" recruiters and employers to let them know that they're not interested.

"Candidates agree to job interviews and fail to show up, never saying more. Some accept jobs, only to not appear for the first day of work, no reason given, of course. Instead of formally quitting, enduring a potentially awkward conversation with a manager, some employees leave and never return. Bosses realize they've quit only after a series of unsuccessful attempts to reach them.... Meredith Jones, an Indianapolis-based director of human resources for a national restaurant operator, now overbooks interviews, knowing up to 50 percent of candidates for entry-level roles likely won't show up."

Long-time Slashdot reader NormalVisual writes, "It'd be interesting to hear Slashdotters' experience with this." Have you ever ghosted a potential employer, or perhaps more relevant, have you ever been ghosted by a potential employer during the hiring process? Do you feel it's unprofessional, or simple justice for the behavior of some companies when the balance of power was more on their side?
Inc. magazine blames the low unemployment rate and "the effects technology have had on the communication style of younger generations." But leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Does ghosting show a lack of professionalism, or is it simple payback for the way corporations treated job-seekers in the past? And have you ever "ghosted" an employer?

At the annual Build conference, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella announced that Kinect is moving to the cloud. "Kinect, when we first launched it in 2010, was a speech-first, gaze-first, vision-first device. It was used in gaming, and then, later on, it came to the PC, and it was used in many applications: medical, industrial, robotics, education," said Nadella. "We've been inspired by what developers have done, and since Kinect, we've made a tremendous amount of progress when it comes to some of the foundational technologies in HoloLens. So we're taking those advances and packaging them up as Project Kinect for Azure." The Verge reports: It's big news after the depth camera and microphone accessory that originally debuted on the Xbox 360 was basically declared dead last October when Microsoft stopped manufacturing it. Alex Kipman, a technical fellow at Microsoft, explained in a LinkedIn blog post that Project Kinect for Azure would combine the depth sensor with Azure AI services that could help developers make devices that will be more precise "with less power consumption." Kipman also notes that AI deep learning on depth images could lead to "cheaper-to-deploy AI algorithms" that require smaller networks to operate.

TechCrunch reports of a flaw in LinkedIn's AutoFill plugin that could have allowed hackers to steal your full name, phone number, email address, location (ZIP code), company, and job title. "Malicious sites have been able to invisibly render the plugin on their entire page so if users who are logged into LinkedIn click anywhere, they'd effectively be hitting a hidden 'AutoFill with LinkedIn' button and giving up their data." From the report: Researcher Jack Cable discovered the issue on April 9th, 2018 and immediately disclosed it to LinkedIn. The company issued a fix on April 10th but didn't inform the public of the issue. Cable quickly informed LinkedIn that its fix, which restricted the use of its AutoFill feature to whitelisted sites who pay LinkedIn to host their ads, still left it open to abuse. If any of those sites have cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, which Cable confirmed some do, hackers can still run AutoFill on their sites by installing an iframe to the vulnerable whitelisted site. He got no response from LinkedIn over the last 9 days so Cable reached out to TechCrunch. A LinkedIn spokesperson issued this statement to TechCrunch: "We immediately prevented unauthorized use of this feature, once we were made aware of the issue. We are now pushing another fix that will address potential additional abuse cases and it will be in place shortly. While we've seen no signs of abuse, we're constantly working to ensure our members' data stays protected. We appreciate the researcher responsibly reporting this and our security team will continue to stay in touch with them. For clarity, LinkedIn AutoFill is not broadly available and only works on whitelisted domains for approved advertisers. It allows visitors to a website to choose to pre-populate a form with information from their LinkedIn profile."

The top priority for developing talent is to train for soft skills, according to LinkedIn's 2018 Workplace Learning Report which surveyed more than 4,000 professionals. From a report: The report found that while automation is requiring workers to maintain technical fluency across roles, the rise of machine-led tasks makes it necessary for them to do what machines can't, which is to be adaptable, critical thinkers who can lead and communicate well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A startup on the Ethereum platform vanished from the internet on Sunday after raising $374,000 USD from investors in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) fundraiser. Confido is a startup that pitched itself as a blockchain-based app for making payments and tracking shipments. It sold digital tokens to investors over the Ethereum blockchain in an ICO that ran from November 6 to 8. During the token sale, Confido sold people bespoke digital tokens that represent their investment in exchange for ether, Ethereum's digital currency. But on Sunday, the company unceremoniously deleted its Twitter account and took down its website. A company representative posted a brief comment to the company's now-private subforum on Reddit, citing legal problems that prevent the Confido team from continuing their work. The same message was also posted to Medium but quickly deleted.

"Right now, we are in a tight spot, as we are having legal trouble caused by a contract we signed," the message stated (a cached version of the Medium post is viewable). "It is likely that we will be able to find a solution to rectify the situation. However, we cannot assure you with 100% certainty that we will get through this." The message was apparently written by Confido's founder, one Joost van Doorn, who seems to have no internet presence besides a now-removed LinkedIn profile. Even the Confido representative on Reddit doesn't seem to know what's going on, though, posting hours after the initial message, "Look I have absolutely no idea what has happened here. The removal of all of our social media platforms and website has come as a complete surprise to me." Confido tokens had a market cap of $10 million last week, before the company disappeared, but now the tokens are worthless. And investors are crying foul.

You asked, he answered!

For Slashdot's 20th anniversary -- and the 23rd anniversary of the first release of Red Hat Linux -- here's a special treat.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has responded to questions submitted by Slashdot readers. Read on for his answers...


What...
by Master5000

...is your day like?

JW: I can tell you this, no two days are the same. Broadly speaking, I strive to prioritize time with customers, partners, and Red Hat associates above other meetings.

When I'm in town, my day starts at 5:30 am with a run. I'll scan email and the news during breakfast and take my kids to school. My first calls usually start at 8 am as I'm driving to the office. Today for instance, I'll meet with a few members of our Corporate Leadership team. I'll then sit down with our chief technologist to hear what's happening in the Office of the CTO.

I usually grab lunch around 11:30 am. I tend to bring my lunch, but will occasionally head to our cafeteria for a sandwich or salad. In the afternoon, I'll get briefed on my schedule for some upcoming events, which will include meetings with partners, customer panels, press, and analysts. I usually spend a few hours a day responding to emails and coordinating activity through email. I try to get home by 6 pm to eat dinner with my family and spend time with my kids. I'll usually jump back on email once everyone is asleep before knocking out around 10 pm.


The plans for CentOS?
By Anonymous Coward

Now that CentOS has received a more official status in the Red Hat world, what are the plans for the project?

JW: The ecosystem around Red Hat Enterprise Linux is sprawling and complex, and that's one of our strengths. You have midnight hobbyists working together with multinational corporations. You have people working on GPU hardware, and you have people working on Ruby apps. Some want the latest-and-greatest, and some want to keep everything exactly the same for years and years. So lots of different kinds of people are doing lots of different kinds of work, and all of them are contributing to this massive project called "Red Hat Enterprise Linux". It's not surprising that we can't accommodate all of that innovation in a single project.

That's one of the reasons we split Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux: we freed up Fedora to be innovative and move quickly, which freed Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be more careful, more conservative, and handle the very important and difficult work of stability and security for code that upstream communities have long since moved past. Fifteen years later, we're still very happy with how that's worked out, and Fedora remains a thriving engine for new ideas that make their way down into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and many other projects.

CentOS solves a very different problem for us. First, there are some people that we can't serve with Red Hat Enterprise Linux today, but we still want to participate in the Red Hat ecosystem. Folks using Xen, for example, may not be able to run today's Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but they can absolutely work with the CentOS project and still participate in the broader ecosystem. Second, there are people and partners who are building software that needs a more stable, Red Hat Enterprise Linux-like lifecycle but want to experiment at the kernel level, stuff which would be impossible for us to support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. OpenVSwitch and DPDK are a perfect example of this, and the CentOS SIG process has served them really well. They can do all the things they need to do in development and with their partner communities, and their innovations still pass from the upstream communities into Fedora, and ultimately into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, and OpenStack.

Meanwhile, changes in hardware and software are changing how we think about a traditional operating system distribution. Things are more automated, hardware is moving faster and less predictably, and containers force us to differentiate between bringing up hardware and creating a stable platform for applications. To address all of these changes, Red Hat is going to need every element of our ecosystem -- Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- to respond.


Systemd, WTF???
by rknop

As I understand it, one of the stated goals was to speed up boot times. It's had exactly the opposite effect on my Ubuntu system -- that is, when the boot doesn't die altogether when I try to mount NFS shares. (Also, thanks to systemd, I can't even *reboot* or shut down the machine when there's a hung NFS process. I am forced to hard-reset it.)

For years, warning flags have been raised about systemd. It more or less seems that we're bringing all the disadvantages of the Windows architecture to Linux, without any of the advantages of running Windows.

So, again: systemd, wtf???

JW: We had a lot of systemd questions, so I am replying to them all collectively.

==========================================================================================================
My question is related: is Red Hat, as an organization, at all concerned about the damage that systemd has done to Linux's usability, its reputation, and its community? Is Red Hat concerned with how systemd has driven so many Linux users to FreeBSD?

................................................................................................

And a follow up, why not spend some of RedHat's money on a sane init system?

I'm sure you can put a few dollars and bright minds on a system that works reliably. The last thing I want my embedded system to do is get hung up on an init failure.

................................................................................................

This begs the question, so I'll just ask it: Have any customers ever moved away from Red Hat because of systemd?
==========================================================================================================

JW: First, allow me to address why Red Hat adopted and invested in systemd as it helps to address many of the other questions. Traditional init systems, like System V init, served the UNIX and Linux communities well for decades, but that is a long time and it is not surprising that they have their limitations. The problems an init system needs to solve today are different from the ones that traditional init systems were solving in the 70's, 80's and even the 90's.

Red Hat considered many available options and even used Canonical's Upstart for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Ultimately we chose systemd because it is the best architecture that provides the extensibility, simplicity, scalability, and well-defined interfaces to address the problems we see today and foresee in the future. Of all the passionate debates and disagreements, the fact remains that systemd is the cornerstone of nearly all Linux distributions on its own merits.

Any change like systemd is going to disruptive. We understand that many were not happy with this change and we appreciate the passion of the community. The continued growth and adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as other systemd based distributions, tell us that most users have embraced systemd and there was not a large exodus to FreeBSD or alternatives. We partner with the largest embedded vendors in the world, particularly in the telecom and automotive industries where stability and reliability is the number one concern. They easily adapted to systemd.

We see new users (both new to Linux and prior SysV init users) who truly take the time to learn systemd embrace the simplicity of the interface and its capabilities. We also hear that it is no more difficult to learn than the complexities of init and rc scripts to a new user. It's simply different.

The Debian community provides a thorough, independent evaluation of the systemd initsystem debate. Additionally, the systemd developers provide a list of the biggest myths around systemd.

There are some real advantages, too. Because systemd tracks processes at the service level, daemons can be properly killed, rather than trusting them to do the right thing. This also makes it easy to use cgroups to configure SLAs for CPU, memory, etc. Likewise, security with SELinux and sandboxing become much simpler. The dependency resolution between services is a significant improvement over the sequential ordering of the init rc script mechanism.

Looking forward to all of the exciting innovation taking place around large cloud scalability, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Containers, we see continued integration and innovation with systemd that would either not be possible or very difficult with init based systems.

So we'll continue to invest in systemd, as it meets our customer's expectations around capabilities, stability, maturity, and community momentum. There's not a realistic alternative today that comes close in terms of adoption and functionality. That said, we're always watching how projects and communities evolve and in that way, systemd is no different from any other component that we ship.

Lastly, I wouldn't dare to debug anyone's setup here, but mounting NFS at boot time is notoriously problematic if you do not have highly available NFS servers. This is a problem that existed before systemd and I think it's much safer to use autofs to mount those volumes on demand or other mount options such as nofail or nobootwait. It is best to not blame systemd for issues that also affect init or are misconfigurations. Ironically, systemd provides more troubleshooting and debug options than init, so that might be helpful to you.


==========================================================================================================
Why isn't Linux on the desktop more widespread?
by snooo53

I'm curious your thoughts on why Linux hasn't grabbed more laptop/desktop marketshare from Windows and MacOS over the years? It seems that with the privacy concerns around Windows 10 and Apple's lack of focus on MacOS there may be a huge opportunity in the near future. What things need to happen in the consumer marketplace and within the OSS community for it to really take off? Can 2017 be the year of the Linux desktop?

................................................................................................

Why not have a consumer desktop?
by Danathar

Given Ubuntu's success at providing a stable, developed and popular desktop environment for non-technical consumer users, why doesn't Red Hat provide the same thing? Why is that right for Ubuntu but not Red Hat?

................................................................................................

Strategy
by olau

Red Hat is big and getting bigger. Where are you heading at the moment? Would Red Hat ever try to move into the the more consumer-focused places where Ubuntu has ventured, or is that just not profitable enough?

................................................................................................

Why does GNOME have such an unusable UI?
by Anonymous Coward

GNOME is a Red Hat project due to the amount of people and funding they get from Red Hat. Then, why does GNOME have such an unusable UI, particularly to the mayor audience of your products? The UI makes basic tasks such as switching between windows a chore unless you install shell extensions, which break frequently and cause unstability.

................................................................................................

Proprietary driver support
by ARos

Many proprietary hardware vendors continue not to take the Linux desktop and workstation markets seriously. Recall, e.g., Linus's rant against NVIDIA. As a leader in the Linux and FOSS communities, what will you do to persuade major vendors to write and maintain functional drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora? ==========================================================================================================

JW: We also had a lot of great questions on the Linux desktop - let me try to answer collectively:

A functioning, useful desktop is obviously critical to the success of the Linux community. A nice GUI makes Linux more accessible and approachable, and that's why we continue to make investments in projects like GNOME, Wayland, and nouveau. Everyone benefits from improvements in this area, so let's call that the baseline. The primary driver for that work is in Fedora, and I was really glad to see such great reviews of F25. If you haven't tried Fedora in a while, now's a good time to jump in. Personally, I love it.

Of course, one of the perils of the desktop is that "desktop success" is so specific to each individual, since everyone has their own opinion about what a desktop should or must do. That means that even when we think about our "baseline" investment in the Linux desktop, someone's going to be disappointed. What's worse, it's very difficult to make money on a "baseline," since it's something that people just expect to have in the first place. Nevertheless, we spend a lot of time and money on getting these projects right because it is so important to the broader community and the success of our own products.

There's another category of desktop, let's call it the "enterprise desktop". This category requires features that just don't come naturally through a community, and they need some additional investment. The "enterprise desktop" customers who pay for a Linux desktop want that same functioning, useful "baseline" desktop, of course. They also want things like enterprise management features, security tools, compliance tools, identity management, and even simple things, like the windowing system should scale correctly when it's run in a VM on Windows.

You've probably already read my comments on the future of the desktop, and you know that I think the "enterprise desktop" market is changing dramatically. You can see this in how Microsoft has changed their own strategy. Among other things, tablets and phones are far more important than they were just five years ago. We don't think about the software on tablets and phones as part of our core business, so we've left that space alone. But their influence is still there, so the "enterprise desktop" features people are willing to pay for has changed, and that's has an influence on how we invest our resources.

There's a third category, which is the "technical workstation". These are power-hungry people with domain-specific applications, like 3D visualizations, animation, fluid dynamics simulations, stuff like that. They naturally gravitate to Linux because that's where the tools and research that makes them successful starts. We've had great success in that space, and we continue to make investments here.


How do you monetize Open Source?
by mykepredko

What would you recommend to somebody who feels they have a great application idea and are probably ready to go for angel/first round funding but feels that the application should be Open Source?

Do you put in customization/support as the way to fund the endeavor long term or is there another approach for the OSS conscious entrepreneur?

JW: Open sourcing an idea is great because you will be able to innovate faster with the community than you would by going it alone. There are many, many open source startups doing exciting things, and many with VC backing. So, there is clearly a path for the OSS conscious entrepreneur. Red Hat chose a subscription model for our business; others have gone the customization/open core route. We believe in an upstream first development model, so open core/customization does not work for us. But, there are certainly many successful open source companies that use this model, and the true answer here is that there are likely a lot of variables depending on what your app is focused on.

Most importantly, recognize the value of the open source development model is around user participation. So building a business model around open source starts with a clear, deliberate strategy on how to get others with different perspectives and expertise involved in writing the code. If you don't have others actively involved in writing the code, then it's hard to get the leverage you need for an open source model to work.

Building a new community is hard. We've started a few at Red Hat, but most of the time we look for existing ones that already have a robust community. Where a robust community exists, open source always wins. From a business model perspective, recognize that you can't sell the value of the functionality, because the functionality is free. So think hard about how you add value around that functionality. For Red Hat products it's typically a combination of commitment to a defined life-cycle with the bits, downstream certifications/eco-system, ability to drive upstream roadmaps to meet our customers need, and support.


Open source?
by martiniturbide

What is the current commitment of Red Hat with open source for 2017? Redhat may be the most profitable software company that endorses open source for their products. What is the recommendation for other companies to be profitable and at the same time remain being good open source citizens?

JW: Red Hat's commitment to open source has never wavered. We are committed to having a 100% open source product portfolio, with an upstream first development model. This means that we do our work to get features integrated into open source projects before we integrate them into Red Hat products. Dave Neary from Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team wrote a good blog post about this approach. And we have followed through on this commitment even with the technologies we acquire â" something I think is pretty unique to Red Hat. In the last few months, we've open-sourced Ansible Tower and Codenvy.

My recommendation to other companies: contribute. In the last few years, we've seen a lot of new voices championing open source. That's great to see, even when it's your competitors. Faster innovation and more choice is always a good thing. But, open source is a commitment, not a buzz phrase. Companies that want to be good open source citizens need to walk the walk. Another must-read on Red Hat's commitment here is this blog post from Paul Cormier.


Building a strong company
by resplin

Red Hat has distinguished itself through its commitment to open source and its ability to remain profitable.

Mike Olson famously said "you can't build a successful stand-alone company purely on open source." He argues that you cannot scale an open source model that does not rely on selling proprietary components because it is too easy for competitors to undercut a vendor's services offerings when they don't have to pay for R&D.

How do you feel about that assessment? Is Red Hat's success impossible to replicate by other open source companies?

JW: First off, let me say that Mike is a great guy. I've known him for many years, since I first joined Red Hat. And I want to applaud him for his work in driving Cloudera to where it is today. I'm thrilled to see their success. But in regards to open source business models, we've agreed to disagree.

I'd argue that Red Hat is a successful company by many metrics, built purely on open source. My contention is that too few open source companies follow the Red Hat model. I don't want to overly bash open core models. Some will be successful, but competitively, I'd argue that there's no faster way to innovate at scale than through open source communities. We've said before that half open is still half closed. I think it's too easy for early adopters to find workarounds to open core offerings, which can hurt a business when it moves past the early adopter phase.

I refer to this a bit earlier in the Q&A, but the important thing to remember in an open source business model is that YOU CAN'T SELL FUNCTIONALITY because it is available for free. If you just think about functionality, then Mike is probably right - you need to add proprietary code that you can sell. But implementing a piece of software in an enterprise context is about so much more than the functionality.

Red Hat is successful because we obsess about finding ways to add value around the code for each of our products. We think of ourselves as helping make open source innovation easily consumable for enterprise customers. Just one example: For all of our products, we focus on life-cycle. Open source is a great development model, but it's "release early, release often" style makes implementing it in production difficult. One important value we play in Linux is that we backport bug fixes and security updates in supported kernels for over a decade, all while never breaking ABI compatibility. That has huge value for enterprises running long-lived applications. We go through this type of process against all of the projects we chose to productize to determine how we add value beyond the source code.

I would agree that this type of business model won't work across every technology category. At Red Hat, we look very deeply at the categories we've expanded into to ask ourselves whether our model can be effective and make an impact in a given space.

What advice do you have for building a sustainable business, especially one that is driven by open source values?

JW: Start off by reading a couple of answers above. To summarize:

1. Start (or find) an open source project that truly benefits from broad participation and work to build (or become involved) in that project. Projects where participation benefits the quality and innovation of the code are inherently advantaged over proprietary code. So you can check the first box - a technology that is superior to competitors.

2. Identify how you can uniquely add value to that technology that transcends the code. This is what I talk about above. The code is free. It's better because of yours and others' contributions. But those are freely given and free to use and therefore are very hard to monetize. Focus on how customers might implement the technology. For Red Hat, we like layers in the stack that are run-times, where enterprises will likely want long-lived support. We also like layers where hardware touches software, because there is huge value in standardization and certifications, which are not attached to the code, but to the products that we rigorously test and build joint support mechanisms for with the hardware vendors. If you identify this, you are well on your way - you have a project that is superior to competitors' and you have a vehicle to uniquely add value to that project in your product.

3. Surround yourself with like-minded, passionate people. Culture always trumps strategy. That's a short paraphrase of a famous quote. Companies too often fail because of internal strife, ethical failings, or simply losing their way. I know that startups have to begin with a product and business model, but durable success happens via people working together to make it a reality. And that's all about culture and leadership.


Recruiting open source talent
by resplin

As Red Hat has scaled, it has to remain staffed with all types of non-technical business professionals. How do you help these professionals learn to "sell free software"? Has it been difficult to train these professionals on the open source business model?

JW: I think that anyone can pretty easily put themselves in our customers' shoes and understand the benefits of open source. For one, no one wants to feel locked into a proprietary solution or data format. We all want choice and flexibility, and open source is a great way to enable that.

For another, everybody wants access to rapidly innovating technology that helps solve their business problems, and our model gives them the ability to consume the latest and greatest technology, but in a way that's stable and secure for the enterprise.

And finally, everybody's experienced the frustration of having something in their car break and not having access to fix it. It seems like many companies deliberately make it difficult for their customers to tinker with or improve their products. Open source is the exact opposite -- we welcome people to take a look under the hood, see how things work or why they're broken, and roll up their sleeves to contribute if they want to make it better. All in all, it's a pretty simple and compelling value proposition that even someone brand new to our company can understand.


Coding Chops
by CrashNBrn

So who wins in a "code off" ?

Jim Whitehurst, Mark Shuttleworth, Tim Cook, Larry Page, or Satya Nadella.

JW: That's a tough one, but I think I could at least compete! I wasn't new to Linux when I joined Red Hat. I'm actually working towards my Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) now. It's not an easy certification to get - if I'm successful, I think I'll have hopefully proven my chops. I can compile a Linux kernel and kernel modules and can build pretty decent apps. Though OpenShift makes building apps so easy, I'm not sure that's a huge distinction. (Note: Shameless plug!)

But the actual answer to your question is Linus Torvalds. He really should be on that list!


A long term view on IoT security?
by mlts

Are there any plans or products to help with IoT security?

RedHat is one of the few companies that can step in and do something in regards to device security, even when device makers have little to no interest in this topic, as to them, security has no ROI, or as one IoT company exec told me, "the only person that has ever made money from a padlock is the lock maker."

Being able to lure IoT vendors to use secure tools wouldn't just benefit them, but it would benefit the Internet in a whole. Even something like manifest lists that interact with FirewallD to ensure a device is only able to communicate with authorized devices and cannot take input/output from rogue sources would improve the IoT ecosystem tremendously.

JW: We are already helping with IoT security indirectly. Open source and Linux powers nearly every IoT device that exists. This is an example of open source winning, you can't escape its reach any longer. That said Red Hat has always been a substantial contributor to open source projects and security is always a part of this collaboration. We were doing security before security was cool.

Rather than putting a focus on individual IoT devices, our focus is on the open source ecosystem as a whole. This is an instance where a rising tide lifts all boats. The goal is not help a single device or vendor, but to work on features that will affect the entire industry. By focusing on improving security in the Kernel, the compiler, glibc, the libraries used, even in the graphical user interfaces, we are helping build the future of IoT device security. IoT is changing the rules and perception around security. There is a lot of opportunity to get IoT security right, which means we have to focus on getting open source security right. We all win or we all lose when it comes to IoT security.


OpenStack vs AWS
by resplin

How can we improve the future of OpenStack? The dominance of Amazon has challenged the relevance of well funded players like Microsoft, Google, and IBM. How can OpenStack compete? The network effects around a dominant cloud platform threaten to relegate OpenStack to be a long term niche player, like Linux on the desktop. How can we avoid this fate?

JW: Most important is that the hybrid cloud is real, and it's increasingly part of the dialog we have with users and customers. Cloud isn't either-or. You can have a mutli-cloud deployment where you are using OpenStack for some workloads and AWS for others. We consistently hear from our customers and users that they are in public clouds like AWS *and* their on-premise cloud deployments. The public cloud providers are all great partners of ours, and I view OpenStack as a complementary technology to them.


As corporate IT loads shift to public clouds...
by Anonymous Coward

...does this marginalize the role of operating system vendors? I would imagine that most AWS customers would lean on Amazon for technical support rather than Red Hat.

JW: On the contrary, the emergence of public cloud has made the operating system even more relevant. There are several reasons why:

The first is around application mobility. The vast majority of customers I speak with plan to use more than one public cloud. So portability becomes a major requirement. And since OS is where the application ultimately touches computing resources, having an OS that can consistently run across all major platforms becomes even more important. As with any single platform provider, optimizations for provider unique hardware, architectures, or services may address specific situations in the OS and we have all seen how that played out in the single-source, vertically integrated Unix stacks - hence Linux. So we remain dogged in our drive in working with all our cloud, hardware, and software partners to ensure that RHEL (and all our products) enable as many platforms as possible to reinforce customer choice and application mobility.

Second, much of the value we provide in Linux is around life-cycle. We commit to a decade+ long life-cycle of patching and support of RHEL. That allows enterprises to confidently run long-lived applications on RHEL. That requires a massive engineering investment in skills, tools and processes. I guess others (like public clouds) could ultimately chose to do that, but it's a very different business than they are in today, and I'm not sure why they would chose to do that versus the many other areas of opportunity that more closely match their current capabilities.

Finally, new application models like containers and microservices are bringing the operating system to the forefront. Each and every container has its user-space dependencies in Linux in it, and therefore requires management of those components in the container regardless of where that container runs. As the leading Linux vendor and as a leader in many of the projects around containers, Red Hat is uniquely positioned to help customers as they build and deploy containers on public clouds or on premise.


Product vs Engineering
by Nite_Hawk

Hi Jim,

Thank you for answering our questions! How do you view top-down product driven development vs bottom-up engineering driven development? Are there situations where one excels vs the other?

JW: To be honest, I'm not sure I'm the right person to answer that question. I've had the great fortune of having a very strong engineering leadership team at Red Hat, so I have allowed them to drive how we engage with communities and build our products.

In a broad sense, Red Hat does a bit of both. Our business model is built from the project out to the product, because we so strongly believe in the power of user driven innovation. So I guess you could say that we are more bottom-up engineering developed. But a big part of our value is taking customer needs and driving those into upstream projects so that they end up in our products. So we really are a hybrid.


Puppet versus Ansible?
by waveclaw

Where do you see the configuration management market going in the next year or two?

JW: First things first, it's interesting to note that Ansible started as an orchestration platform that also happens to be able to do configuration management as well.

Orchestration is the hot topic right now for automation versus last year's configuration management tools. Ansible is more orchestration than configuration management. Puppet and Chef require tools like mCollective to pick up the orchestration piece. Red Hat now runs Tower. And Tower now ships as part of the Red Hat Ceph storage product. Red Hat's Satellite product is based on the Foreman which includes Salt, Puppet, Chef and Ansible support.

But where is this market heading? Are we likely to see consolidation? Integrations? Or even a flood of config management system tied products from vendors?

JW: Orchestration isn't a natural capability of many of the other tools on the market, but if you think about it, the ability to orchestrate configurations is really pretty critical. As it turns out, the order in which you provision IT applications and environments is really, really important. And Ansible handles this by design.

That being said, we have a number of customers that use other configuration management platforms like Puppet and Chef, and they use Ansible to deploy and manage agents, and then to orchestrate application deployments by deploying configurations as defined by these other tools. So really, it's easily a "yes, and" story, not an "either or".

Then we have Ansible Tower -- which actually, Red Hat was a paying Ansible Tower customer before we acquired them. Tower helps orgs operationalize automation across all their teams and IT environments in ways other tools cannot easily do otherwise. It's also key to plumbing automation into devops workflows.

There is some possible consolidation, but there's still a lot of market adoption to be had. We come across customers every day that have previously not used any configuration management solution at scale. This is a problem for those companies that want to scale, and running workloads in the cloud or with containers is nearly impossible without a mature automation and configuration management posture. So while there's some consolidation possible, there's still a lot of growth out there. As for config management being tied to vendors, I suspect that you'll continue to see other organizations mirror our approach to hybrid here. For an IT org that is trying to juggle deployments both on-premesis as well as in the cloud, they need tools that will work just as well in either location. This is a particular strength of things like Ansible.


Are there plans to tighten Ansible Integration
by waveclaw

We use and love Ansible, but it still seems to be a separate product. Are there plans to integrate it more? Having it as an integrated deployment option for JBOSS Operations network (JON) would be good.

JW: When we acquired Ansible, we knew we had to be careful not to immediately crush them with all of our scaling requirements. At this point, roughly 18 months post-acquisition, we can say that the Ansible team is heavily engaged with nearly every Red Hat product team. So whether you're talking about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenStack, OpenShift Container Platform, Ceph Storage, CloudForms, Insights, or many of our other offerings, Ansible is either already integral to those offerings, or is being planned for a near release. It's an important piece across our portfolio.

Specifically to JBoss and our middleware offerings, several of our consulting teams came together to create a Ansible Roles to ease the deployment and management of various JBoss offerings. And I think that illustrates perfectly what Ansible means to us -- even our services teams are engaging in the Ansible community and getting involved. Which is both a testament to what Ansible can enable customers to do, but also to the love that so many different teams across Red Hat have for Ansible.


If meritocracy over democracy...
by turkeydance

if meritocracy over democracy is his choice, who decides what is "merit"?

JW: Great question. One thing that's important to me is that we continually question how well we apply the principle of meritocracy in practice. In general, we try to define our business goals and the problems we're trying to solve in clear and objective terms, so that it's obvious to everyone what the best and most feasible ideas are. You can get a feel for what kinds of information and detail we share internally by checking out the Open Decision Framework, which is a collection of our best practices for making open and inclusive decisions. We think of meritocracy as a leadership behavior, and you can see how we define it here. (PS: You can also find it on GitHub under a Creative Commons license.)

In practice at Red Hat, people with a long history of contribution and good ideas build their reputations as people to be listened to. It's not a perfect process, but because it is a "multi-round game" with reputations built over many interactions, it's a pretty good way for informal leaders to emerge.


Enterprise Desktop Market / Emerging / Demand
by GioMac

I am running more than 250 Linux desktops at the company and can get even more, but there is no centralized management solutions for that, and that's an issue with customization and security too. KDE desktop is very good at some point with it's ability to have strict configuration files and immutable options, that does about 25% of what we can get with Microsoft and Group Policy Object, and we see that a little effort is required to make things work.

Can we expect that Red Hat will enter that market in the nearest (3-4 Y) future?

JW: I appreciate the feedback and idea for a new market for us. Let me take that feedback back to our desktop team. I really can't talk about future product plans in this venue, but I'll make sure they know that you see an opportunity here.


RHCA Exams
by kamilyunis

My question is about Red Hat Certified Architect exams. It is very good and we are very happy about Red Hat's new subscription-based trainings. It is great. But when it comes to RHCA, it is limited for locations.

RHCA level exams are very expensive, and travel and accomodations make it more expensive. I am 2xRHCE, because of these exams is available in my location. Azerbaijan Baku, MIddle EAST, Caucasus does not have center to take exam. Please take this into consideration. Vmware, Cisco, Microsoft, AWS, OpenStack make their exams available in everywhere online, so it is easy for everyone to take it. Why open source company limits people passions to location.

I believe that me and people like me can become multi level RHCA if they get chance to take exam in their own location. And this will help recognition and value of RedHat in regions also. Please make this available as Cisco for us. At least make it possible on Kiosk In Georgia or Azerbaijan so we can take exams also. I am from Azerbaijan, Baku. With Loves to best open source company in the world.

JW: We recognize the need to reach people who are interested in certification throughout the world. We are constantly expanding our global testing options, and increasing the number of ways we offer testing for our certifications, including adding secure, preconfigured kiosks and laptops with our Red Hat Training Partners.


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Red Hat Enterprise Linux is too static to keep pace with kernel devel.
by nbritton

I have found that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is too stagnate / static to keep pace with the rate at which the kernel is now developed. The 3.10 kernel is four years old at this point and the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will be in production support until 2024 is disheartening because the enterprise industry will be a decade behind the latest kernel developments and updates from associated projects. Compared to other vendors' Linux offerings, when I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux I get the same feelings I got when I was force to use AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris. I hated administrating those products because they were stuck with defaults like ksh from a decade ago.

My question is, would Red Hat ever consider releasing a Linux distribution with a shorter development cycle and with more aggressive tracking of upstream projects? I see a place for a distribution that is somewhere in between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Perhaps you could morph or fork CentOS into the upstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux? For example: Upstream --> Fedora (Bleeding Edge) --> CentOS (Next Release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) --> Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This would give system engineers and architects a greater range of products to choose from and it could help stabilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux even more then it already is.

In short, the Linux kernel is the largest and the fastest moving software project in the world, so what changes are you going to make to keep up with it?

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The Price of Reliability
by hcs_$reboot

Worked on SunOS, Solaris, MacOS, Red Hat, CentOS, and, more recently, Ubuntu. CIOs choose Red Hat mainly for support and reliability. Reliability is the word that comes to most engineers mind when the RH and CentOS OSes are mentioned (certainly for good reasons). Reliability mainly relies on using older kernels and features, that have been patched over and over ; sure, that works, reliability wise. But on a number of rather recent projects, comparing Ubuntu server and RH/CentOS, it appears setting services up (eg Samba) was way easier on the newer Ubuntues than on the latest RH/Centos (not mentioning the many issues migrating from 6 to 7) . Also, using newer kernels, Ubuntu performs well, taking advantage of the newest internals, memory management and sharing, IPC etc ... and no specific reliability issue (IMHO, reliability wise, Ubuntu and the like are as solid as RH nowadays).

Question: in 2017, does reliability still mean using long-tested, but older kernels and features?
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JW: There's a common misperception that Red Hat Enterprise Linux pulls a Fedora kernel and stays on it for 10+ years while the world moves onto newer kernel versions with better features and newer hardware. It's true that we standardize on a specific kernel version for the life of a major release, but that's not the whole story.

Our stability is actually in our kernel ABI (kABI), which is a promise of stability that a kernel developer can rely on for the life of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. When we release a major version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux we actually backport many key features from newer kernels, bugfixes, etc. and we do it in a surgical way that not only delivers new features and hardware on an older kernel, but also preserves the kABI. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was based on the 2.6.32, but when we released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 it also had an additional 2600 patches (features, hardware, bugfixes, CVEs) and this continues for the development life of the release. The stats on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 are similar. This provides a customer expected balance between stability and innovation. We also have a driver update program (DUP) that makes it easy to add kernel drivers prior to the public availability of the next minor release.

So don't take the kernel version at face value -- we spend a lot of time backporting newer kernel features into every major release! If you want the latest and greatest and don't care about kABI, ABI and long-term stability, Fedora is ready for you.

Enterprise customers continue to expect stability, security, scalability and reliability, but also want higher levels of automation and ease of use, multiple deployment methods (bare metal, virtualization, containers and cloud) and the new features as they appear upstream and with hardware and userspace tools that can help to exploit them. If we sense critical new features going upstream that will break kABI and can't be backported, we will plan accordingly.

"Could it turn out users actually prefer to trade a little CPU time to website owners in favor of them not showing ads?" writes phonewebcam, a long-time Slashdot reader. Slashdot covered the downside [of in-browser cryptocurrency mining] recently, with even [Portuguese professional sportsballer] Cristiano Ronaldo's official site falling victim, but that may not be the full story. This could be an ideal win-win situation, except for one huge downside -- the current gang of online advertisers.
By "current gang of online advertisers," he means Google, according to a longer essay at LinkedIn: Naturally, the world's largest ad broker, which runs the world most popular browser (desktop and mobile) is keen to see how this plays out, and is also uniquely placed to be able to heavily influence it, too... As it happens, Chrome users can already do something about it via extensions, for example AntiMiner... If cryptocurrencies have a future - and that's a big if (look at China's Bitcoin ban) - it could well turn out that their role just took an unexpected turn.

Susan Mauldin, the person in charge of the Equifax's data security, has a bachelor's degree and a master of fine arts degree in music composition from the University of Georgia, according to her LinkedIn profile. Mauldin's LinkedIn profile lists no education related to technology or security. If that wasn't enough, news outlet MarketWatch reported on Friday that Susan Mauldin's LinkedIn page was made private and her last name was replaced with "M", in a move that appears to keep her education background secret.

Earlier this month Equifax, which is one of the three major consumer credit reporting agencies, said that hackers had gained access to company data that potentially compromised sensitive information for 143 million American consumers, including Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers. On Friday, the UK arm of the organisation said files containing information on "fewer than 400,000" UK consumers was accessed in the breach.

UPDATE (9/16/2017): CSO Susan Mauldin has abruptly 'retired' from Equifax.

An anonymous reader shares an article: LinkedIn's 2017 U.S. State of Salary report is out, and tech is on top as the most lucrative career. Computer science majors are paid the most, with a median salary of $92,300. Software and IT services is the highest paid industry, with a median total compensation of $104,700.

theodp writes: Fortune reports that LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is "leading a $30 million funding round in Change.org, a for-profit petition and fundraising website focused on social and political change." Joining Hoffman in this round, as well as an earlier $25 million round in 2014, is Bill Gates. Change.org, Hoffman explained in a Friday LinkedIn post, "helps enable a world where you don't need to hire a lobbyist to have real impact on the issues and policies that matter to you." He added, "In its decade of existence, Change.org petitions have resulted in more than 21,000 victories, i.e., instances in which a government agency, corporation, or other entity has changed a regulation or a policy in the face of a Change.org petition urging it to do so." Last year, Hoffman joined Gates and some of the biggest names in tech and corporate America who threw their weight behind a Change.org petition that tried to get Congress to fund K-12 Computer Science education. The Change.org petition fell short of its 150,000-signature goal despite claims of support from 90% of the parents of the nation's 58 million K-12 schoolchildren (based on a Google-funded survey of 1,685 parents), widespread press coverage (including a full-page ad in petition signer Jeff Bezos's Washington Post), lobbying efforts by the tech coalition that organized the petition (which counts LinkedIn and Microsoft among its members), and even some free PR from Change.org.

theodp writes: The Mercury News reports on REACH, a new software apprenticeship program that LinkedIn's engineering team started piloting this month, which offers people without Computer Science degrees an opportunity to get a foot in the door, as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn searches for ways to help diversify its workforce. For now, the 29 REACH participants are paid, but are only short-term LinkedIn employees (for the duration of the 6-month program). LinkedIn indicated it hopes to learn if tech internships could eventually be made part of the regular hiring process, perhaps unaware that no-CS-degree-required hiring for entry-level permanent positions in software development was standard practice in the 70's and 80's, back when women made up almost 40% of those working as programmers and in software-related fields, nearly double the percentage of women in LinkedIn's global 2016 tech workforce. Hey, even in tech hiring, everything old is new again!

theodp writes: The Mercury News reports on REACH, a new software apprenticeship program that LinkedIn's engineering team started piloting this month, which offers people without Computer Science degrees an opportunity to get a foot in the door, as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn searches for ways to help diversify its workforce. For now, the 29 REACH participants are paid, but are only short-term LinkedIn employees (for the duration of the 6-month program). LinkedIn indicated it hopes to learn if tech internships could eventually be made part of the regular hiring process, perhaps unaware that no-CS-degree-required hiring for entry-level permanent positions in software development was standard practice in the 70's and 80's, back when women made up almost 40% of those working as programmers and in software-related fields, nearly double the percentage of women in LinkedIn's global 2016 tech workforce. Hey, even in tech hiring, everything old is new again!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We're now approaching the four-year anniversary of Microsoft's rollout (and subsequent reversal) of a controversial plan to let game publishers limit resale of used, disc-based games. Looking back on that time recently, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Windows and Devices Yusuf Mehdi acknowledged how that rollout fell flat and discussed how hard it was for the firm to change course even in light of fan complaints at the time. In a blog post on LinkedIn posted last weekend, Mehdi writes: "With our initial announcement of Xbox One and our desire to deliver breakthroughs in gaming and entertainment, the team made a few key decisions regarding connectivity requirements and how games would be purchased that didn't land well with fans. While the intent was good -- we imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing and new ways to try and buy games, we didn't deliver what our fans wanted. We heard their feedback, and while it required great technical work, we changed Xbox One to work the same way as Xbox 360 for how our customers could play, share, lend, and resell games. This experience was such a powerful reminder that we must always do the right thing for our customers, and since we've made that commitment to our Xbox fans, we've never looked back." It's an interesting reflection in light of an interview Mehdi gave to Ars Technica at E3 2013, when the executive defended Microsoft's announced plans for Xbox One game licensing. Mehdi, then serving as Xbox chief marketing and strategy officer, stressed at the time that "this is a big change, consumers don't always love change, and there's a lot of education we have to provide to make sure that people understand... We're trying to do something pretty big in terms of moving the industry forward for console gaming into the digital world. We believe the digital world is the future, and we believe digital is better."

New submitter mendred quotes a report from Mashable: Celestine Omin, a software engineer at Andela -- a tech startup that connects developers in Africa with U.S employers -- had a particularly unwelcoming reception when he deplaned at John F. Kennedy Airport and was given a test to prove he was actually a software engineer. A LinkedIn post detailing Omin's challenging experience explained that upon landing in New York after spending 24 miserable hours on a Qatar Airways flight, he was given some trouble about the short-term visa he obtained for his trip. According to the post, an unprepared and exhausted Omin waited in the airport for approximately 20 minutes before being questioned by a Customs and Border Protection officer about his occupation. After several questions were asked, he was reportedly brought to a small room and told to sit down, where he was left for another hour before another customs officer entered and resumed grilling him. Omin was instructed to answer the following questions: "Write a function to check if a Binary Search Tree is balanced," and "What is an abstract class, and why do you need it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Russian authorities arrested Ruslan Stoyanov, one of Kaspersky Lab's top-ranked security researchers, under article 275 of the Russian criminal code, which refers to treason. According to Russian newspaper Kommersant, who broke the story today, Stoyanov was arrested in December, together with the head of the Russian Secret Service (FSB) information security department Sergei Mikhailov. In a statement released today by Kaspersky Lab, the company says that Stoyanov was arrested based on activities he partook in before joining the company. Details regarding the investigation are murky, but according to the Russian newspaper who quotes anonymous sources, Stoyanov was involved in facilitating the transfer of funds from foreign companies to Mikhailov's accounts. According to Stoyanov's LinkedIn account, before serving as Head of the Computer Incidents Investigation Team at Kaspersky, he worked as Deputy Director for a company called Indrik, but also as a Major in the Ministry of Interior's Cyber Crime Unit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: General Motors Co Chief Executive Mary Barra said on Thursday the automaker will expand testing of self-driving vehicles to Michigan, and will build its next generation of self-driving cars in the Michigan plant that builds the Chevrolet Bolt electric car. GM has been accelerating its efforts to deploy self-driving cars, earlier this year buying autonomous driving startup Cruise Automation. GM and Cruise engineers have been testing self-driving prototypes in Arizona and California. Rivals, including Ford Motor Co, Uber Technologies and Alphabet Inc's Waymo self-driving car unit, are also testing autonomous vehicles on public roads in various states and countries. Barra used a press conference at the company's Detroit headquarters to show off an electric Chevrolet Bolt equipped with roof-top sensors designed to enable autonomous driving. GM executives have said the automaker could eventually deploy self driving electric cars in fleets managed by its ride services partner, Lyft. However, Barra did not address Lyft in her remarks Thursday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Israeli hacker Amihai Neiderman needed three days to hack into Tel Aviv's free public Wi-Fi. He only worked during the evenings, after he came home from his full-time job as a security researcher. The 26-year-old said the difficulty level was "a solid 5" on a scale from 1 to 10. The hack, performed in 2014 and recently explained in detail during the DefCamp conference in Bucharest, Romania, shows how vulnerable public networks can be and why we should encrypt our web traffic while accessing them. He hacked his city out of curiosity. One day, he was driving home from work and he noticed the "FREE_TLV" displayed on his smartphone. He had no idea what it was, but got intrigued. It turned out to be Tel Aviv's free municipal Wi-Fi network. The hacker connected to it and checked what his IP was, using http://whatismyip.com. This way, you usually find the address of the router that links you to the internet. To hack Tel Aviv, he needed to take control over this device. Neiderman got home and found out that the router had one port open. He tried it. This step allowed him to determine the manufacturer of the router. It turned out to be Peplink, a company he had never heard of. It made the mistake of having the administration interfaces online. At this point, he still didn't know what device he was connecting to. He compared different products displayed on the company's website and looked for additional clues in the messages sent to him by the unidentified device. He finally found out it was a high-end load balancing router. All he needed was a vulnerability to exploit. But breaking the firmware of the router seemed time consuming, as files were encrypted, so the hacker took a different approach. He found a less protected version of the firmware, used for a different device, and found a vulnerability there. To his luck, the same glitch was present in the version installed on the very devices that made up "FREE_TLV." He tested the hack at home, emulating the city's network, and it worked. A real-life test would had been illegal.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via WinBeta: A new report from scientists Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, and Assam El-Osta says that 20% of scientific papers on genes contain gene name conversion errors caused by Excel. In the scientific article, titled "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature," article's abstract section, the scientists explain: "The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."

It's easy to see why Excel might have problems with certain gene names when you see the "gene symbols" that the scientists use as examples: "For example, gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to '2-Sep' and '1-Mar', respectively. Furthermore, RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession '2310009E13' to '2.31E+13'). Since that report, we have uncovered further instances where gene symbols were converted to dates in supplementary data of recently published papers (e.g. 'SEPT2' converted to '2006/09/02'). This suggests that gene name errors continue to be a problem in supplementary files accompanying articles. Inadvertent gene symbol conversion is problematic because these supplementary files are an important resource in the genomics community that are frequently reused. Our aim here is to raise awareness of the problem." You can view the scientific paper in its entirety here.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via WinBeta: A new report from scientists Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, and Assam El-Osta says that 20% of scientific papers on genes contain gene name conversion errors caused by Excel. In the scientific article, titled "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature," article's abstract section, the scientists explain: "The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."

It's easy to see why Excel might have problems with certain gene names when you see the "gene symbols" that the scientists use as examples: "For example, gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to '2-Sep' and '1-Mar', respectively. Furthermore, RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession '2310009E13' to '2.31E+13'). Since that report, we have uncovered further instances where gene symbols were converted to dates in supplementary data of recently published papers (e.g. 'SEPT2' converted to '2006/09/02'). This suggests that gene name errors continue to be a problem in supplementary files accompanying articles. Inadvertent gene symbol conversion is problematic because these supplementary files are an important resource in the genomics community that are frequently reused. Our aim here is to raise awareness of the problem." You can view the scientific paper in its entirety here.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via TechCrunch: Sources inside the AR helmet company Skully say the startup is no more. TechCrunch reports: "Operations have ceased within the company, and we're told the website will be turned off at some point today. [Skully's CEO and co-founder Marcus Weller] has also been asked to sign a confidentiality deal with investors. Weller told TechCrunch today he will not sign and that he's completely walked away from all dealings with the company as of 10 days ago. The site is still up for now but it says Skully's AR-1 helmet is sold out in every size and no one is able to order. A source tells us sales were cut off on Monday. The shutdown leaves several vendors and Skully's manufacturer Flextronics with unpaid bills and at least 50 full-time employees out of a job. It's unclear if any of the vendors will be paid. That also means the more than 3,000 people who pre-ordered a helmet may never get one -- and one source tells us it's doubtful any of them will be receiving a refund." One source claims Weller botched a possible acquisition deal with Chinese company LeSports before leaving the company last week, while another says the deal might still happen now that the former CEO is gone. Weller is saying that he and his brother were forced out of the company after investors disagreed with the LeSports deal. Investors from Intel Capital ultimately determined it was best to simply shut down the entire company instead of trying to salvage the company Weller started. "We're disappointed Skully has closed its doors. We've been focused on the company's success for nearly two years and have recently been trying to negotiate a funding round to keep it going," Intel Capital said in a statement. "We're certainly sorry for the employees who are losing their jobs, the crowdfunding backers whose investments didn't work out and the customers who'd pre-purchased product. We continue to be excited by the promise of this kind of wearable technology."

UPDATE 8/10/16: Skully has sent an email to its customers telling them they have officially closed their doors. TechCrunch reports that the site is still up, but the company is no more. "Over the past several weeks our management team has worked feverishly to raise additional capital but unforeseen challenges and circumstances, beyond our control, made this effort impossible," the letter to customers reads. The company is filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which means customers will likely not be getting a refund on pre-orders for the $1500 AR helmet.

An anonymous reader writes: As America celebrates Father's Day, The Next Web reports on an IBM engineer who found a way to combine his daughters' interest in the Harry Potter series with an educational home technology project. Together they built a Hogwarts-style sorting hat -- which assigns its wearer into an appropriate residence house at the school of magic -- and it does it using IBM's cognitive computing platform Watson. "The hat uses Watson's Natural Language Classifier and Speech to Text to let the wearer simply talk to the hat, then be sorted according to what he or she says..." reports The Next Web. "Anderson coded the hat to pick up on words that fit the characteristics of each Hogwarts house, with brainy and cleverness going right into Ravenclaw's territory and honesty a recognized Hufflepuff attribute."
The hat's algorithm would place Stephen Hawking and Hillary Clinton into Ravenclaw, according to the article, while Donald Trump "was assigned to Gryffindor for his boldness -- but only with a 48 percent certainty."

The sorting hat talks, drawing its data directly from the IBM Cloud, and if you're interested in building your own, the IBM engineer has shared a tutorial online.

An anonymous reader cites a ZDNet report: Reports indicate that a LinkedIn data breach may have led to the sale of sensitive data belonging to 117 million users. The company's website experienced a data breach in 2012, but the true consequences of the breach are only now becoming apparent. Users of LinkedIn's website in 2012 discovered that roughly 6.5 million user account passwords were posted online, and the company never completely confirmed just who was impacted by the security incident. However, a hacker called "Peace" told the publication that this information is being sold on the dark web for roughly $2,200, and paid hacker data search engine LeakedSource also claims to have the data. Both sources say there are approximately 167 million accounts in the data dump, 117 million of which have both emails and encrypted passwords.LinkedIn has acknowledged the breach. In a blog post, the company writes: Yesterday, we became aware of an additional set of data that had just been released that claims to be email and hashed password combinations of more than 100 million LinkedIn members from that same theft in 2012. We are taking immediate steps to invalidate the passwords of the accounts impacted, and we will contact those members to reset their passwords. We have no indication that this is as a result of a new security breach.

destinyland writes: LinkedIn is open sourcing their testing frameworks, and sharing details of their revamped development process after their latest app required a year and over 250 engineers. Their new paradigm? "Release three times per day, with no more than three hours between when code is committed and when that code is available to members," according to a senior engineer on LinkedIn's blog. This requires a three-hour pipeline where everything is automated, from committing code to releasing it into production, along with automated analyses and testing. "Holding ourselves to this constraint ensures we won't revert to using manual validation to certify our releases."

Steve Hasselbach is a Senior Solutions Architect (AKA Marketing Guy -- but he's also a serious techie) for Peak 10, a datacenter company. In his work he deals with his clients' security problems, and often shakes his head at how security unconscious so many businesses are, even after endless publicity about corporate IT security holes costing companies millions of dollars.

He says, "...it doesn’t shock me anymore, but you’d be so shocked and surprised at how noncompliant this country is in terms of businesses around things like healthcare data and all that." In this interview, Steve talks about how (surprise!) the current BYOD trend is making things worse, but isn't necessarily responsible for the worst security holes, and offers benefits that might outweigh the increased security risks it brings.. (Note: The transcript contains material not included in the video.)

Joey Amanchukwu is co-founder and CEO of Transforia, a company that leases computers pre-loaded with Red Hat Enterprise Linux -- a distro choice that may have been made at least partly because Joey used to sell for Red Hat.

There have been other companies that tried to sell Linux desktops and laptops on a "don't worry about a thing; we'll administer them for you, no problem" basis. Not a lot (maybe none) of those companies have survived, as far as we know. Will Transforia manage to make it big? Or at least become profitable? We'll see.

On December 28, 2015, Larry Seltzer wrote an article for Ars Technica provocatively titled (by Ars editors), The App-ocalypse: Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete? A link to this article was posted on Slashdot, where it provoked a spirited discussion. In this video conversation, we talked to Larry about mobile aps vs. Web standards. Not surprisingly, he had some interesting things to say.

This conversation was generated by a post Eric S. Raymond published on his "Armed and Dangerous" blog that said, "...if you are any kind of open-source leader or senior figure who is male, do not be alone with any female, ever, at a technical conference. Try to avoid even being alone, ever, because there is a chance that a 'women in tech' advocacy group is going to try to collect your scalp." Eric later wrote a post about how Social Justice Warriors may be more of a problem than the problems they complain about.

Whoa! Predatory women in tech trying to entrap people like (and including) Linus Torvalds the way an old-time private eye got the goods on an errant husband as part of a divorce case? Scary! And worrying about thoughtcrime, too? Oh my! But Liz Bennett is an actual software engineer who works at Loggly in San Francisco. She writes for her company's blog when she's not writing Java code, has a (not very active) GitHub account, and plays bassoon. And her attitude is similar to the one espoused by ESR in the second post (above): write great code -- and if you do, they (for any value of they) have no right to be negative about you, period. And, she says, before you take a job you should be sure the company is a good "fit" for you and doesn't harbor people who will work to bring you down -- which is great advice for anyone, in any field of endeavor.

An anonymous reader writes: LinkedIn has fixed a security bug that allowed attackers to use its own CSS code for clickjacking attacks. Basically attackers can create blog posts and load CSS classes from LinkedIn's own stylesheets. If a reader lands on that blog post, then a malicious link can be shown for the entire area of the page. Not something "unique" since this type of method is quite well-known, but you don't generally expect to find these kind of attacks on LinkedIn's own platform. (Here's a link to the LinkedIn security blog. Sorry for not linking to the particular blog — LinkedIn has a weird URL policy. It's the first one.)

sarahnaomi writes: Ransomware, the devilish family of malware that locks down a victim's files until he or she coughs up a hefty bounty, may soon be coming to Mac. Last week, a Brazilian security researcher produced a proof-of-concept for what appears to be the first ransomware to target Mac operating systems (Mac OS X). On Monday, cybersecurity company Symantec verified the researcher's findings. "Mabouia is the first case of file-based crypto ransomware for OS X, albeit a proof-of-concept," Symantec wrote in a blog post. "It's simple code, I did it in two days," [said] the creator of the malware.

theodp writes: Mattel came under fire last November over its portrayal of Computer Engineer Barbie as incompetent. But the toymaker is now drawing kudos for its new Imagine the Possibilities Barbie ad campaign (video), which shows little girls pretending to be professionals in real-life settings, including a college professor lecturing students about the brain. Ad Age, however, is cynical of the empowering spin on Barbie, which it says "comes across as a manipulative way to silence criticism." Interestingly, some of that criticism may have come from the White House.

WH Visitor Records show that Barbie's brainy makeover came after Mattel execs — Evelyn Mazzocco, Julia Pistor, Heather Lazarus — were summoned to the White House last April to meet with the White House Council on Women and Girls. A little Googling suggests other attendees at the sit-down included representatives of the nation's leading toy makers (Disney Consumer, Nickelodeon, Hasbro, American Girl), media giants (Disney Channels, Viacom, TIME, Scholastic, Univision, Participant Media, Cartoon Network, Netflix), retailers (Walmart, Target), educators, scientists, the U.S. Dept. of Education (including the Deputy Director of Michelle Obama's Reach Higher Initiative), philanthropists (Rockefeller, Harnisch Foundations) — and Google. Representing Google was CS Education in Media Program Manager Julie Ann Crommett, who has worked with Disney to shape programming to inspire girls to pursue CS in conjunction with the search giant's $50 million Made With Code initiative.

The April White House meeting appears to be a reschedule of a planned March meeting that was to have included other Mattel execs, including Stephanie Cota, Venetia Davie, and Lori Pantel, to whom the task of apologizing for Computer Engineer Barbie fell last November. For the first time in over a decade, Barbie was no longer the most popular girls' toy last holiday season, having lost her crown to Disney Princesses Elsa and Anna, who coincidentally teamed up with Google-backed Code.org last December to "teach President Obama to code" at a widely-publicized White House event.

The ARTEMIS Innovation web site says, "John C. Mankins, President of Artemis Innovation Management Solutions LLC, is an internationally recognized leader in space systems and technology innovation...." And one of John's biggest recent projects is coming up with a practical way to collect solar energy beyond our atmosphere and use it not only in space, but how to beam it down to the Earth's surface where we can use it to power our plug-in cars, household appliances, and other electrical devices.

An anonymous reader writes with the story of how Sanmay Ved bought "Google.com" even though it only lasted a minute. BGR reports:We've all been there: It's nearly 2 in the morning and you're cruising around the Internet looking for new domain names to purchase. I mean, talk about a cliched night, right? Now imagine that during the course of your domain browsing, you unexpectedly discover that the holy grail of domain names — Google.com — is available for purchase for the low, low price of just $12. Testing fate, you attempt to initiate a transaction. Dare I say, you're feeling a little bit lucky. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, the transaction goes through and the vaunted and the highly valuable Google domain is in your possession. While this might read like a ridiculous plot summary from some horrible piece of nerd fiction, this series of events above, believe it or not, actually happened to former Googler Sanmay Ved earlier this week.

The answer seems to be: sort of, a little, but not a whole lot, according to Jerry Irvine, who is a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Cybersecurity Leadership Council and CIO of Chicago-based Prescient Solutions. More security theater? It sounds that way when Jerry starts reeling off the kinds of attacks the new cards will do nothing to prevent. Even so, October 1 is the date after which merchants are supposed to be liable for fraudulent purchases made with old-style cards, and are supposed to have point of sale terminals that accept "chip and PIN" cards.

Meet Kickstarter co-founder and CEO Yancey Strickler. Timothy Lord asked Yancey about Kickstarter's recent move to become a Public Benefit Corporation, which is, according to Wikipedia, "a specific type of corporation that allows for public benefit to be a charter purpose in addition to the traditional corporate goal of maximizing profit for shareholders."

This corporate restructuring has no tax advantages, and creates a slight increase in paperwork, Yancey says. So why did they do it? Please view the video (or read the transcript, which has more info than the video) to find out.

The IoT is becoming more pervasive partly because processor costs are dropping. So are bandwidth costs, even if your ISP isn't sharing those savings with you. Today's interviewee, Mark Skarpness, is "the Director of Embedded Software in the Open Source Technology Center at Intel Corporation," which is an amazing mouthful of a title. What it means is that he works to extend Intel's reach into Open Source communities, and is also aware of how hardware and software price drops -- and bandwidth price drops at the "wholesale" level -- mean that if you add a dash of IPV6, even lowly flip-flops might have their own IPs one day.

This video interview is a little less than six minutes long, while the text transcript covers a 17 minute conversation between Mark Skarpness and Slashdot's Timothy Lord. The video can be considered a "meet Mark" thing, and watching it will surely give you the idea that yes, this guy knows his stuff, but for more info about the spread of the IoT and how the Open Hardware MinnowBoard fits into the panoply of developer tools for IoT work, you'll have to read the transcript.

theodp writes: New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan questions whether her paper's portrayal of Amazon's brutal workplace was on target, citing a long, passionate response in disagreement from Nick Ciubotariu, a head of infrastructure development at Amazon. Interestingly, Ciubotariu — whose take on Amazon's work-life balance ("I've never worked a single weekend when I didn't want to") was used as Exhibit A by CEO Jeff Bezos to refute the NYT's report — wrote last December of regretting his role as an enabler of his team's "Death March" at a former employer (perhaps Microsoft, judging by Ciubotariu's LinkedIn profile and his essay's HiPo and Vegas references). "I asked if there were any questions," wrote Ciubotariu of a team meeting. "Nadia, one of my Engineers, had one: 'Nick, when will this finally end?' As I looked around the room, I saw 9 completely broken human beings. We had been working over 100 hours a week for the past 2 months. Two of my Engineers had tears on their faces. I did my best to keep from completely breaking down myself. With my voice choking, I looked at everyone, and said: 'This ends right now'." Ciubotariu added, "I hope they can forgive me for being an enabler of their death march, however unwilling, and that I ultimately didn't do enough to stop it. As a 'reward' for all this, I calibrated #1 overall in my organization, and received yet another HiPo nomination and induction, at the cost of a shattered family life, my health, and a broken team. I don't think I ever felt worse in my entire career. If I could give it all back, I would, in an instant, no questions asked. Physically and mentally, I took about a year to heal."

theodp writes: New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan questions whether her paper's portrayal of Amazon's brutal workplace was on target, citing a long, passionate response in disagreement from Nick Ciubotariu, a head of infrastructure development at Amazon. Interestingly, Ciubotariu — whose take on Amazon's work-life balance ("I've never worked a single weekend when I didn't want to") was used as Exhibit A by CEO Jeff Bezos to refute the NYT's report — wrote last December of regretting his role as an enabler of his team's "Death March" at a former employer (perhaps Microsoft, judging by Ciubotariu's LinkedIn profile and his essay's HiPo and Vegas references). "I asked if there were any questions," wrote Ciubotariu of a team meeting. "Nadia, one of my Engineers, had one: 'Nick, when will this finally end?' As I looked around the room, I saw 9 completely broken human beings. We had been working over 100 hours a week for the past 2 months. Two of my Engineers had tears on their faces. I did my best to keep from completely breaking down myself. With my voice choking, I looked at everyone, and said: 'This ends right now'." Ciubotariu added, "I hope they can forgive me for being an enabler of their death march, however unwilling, and that I ultimately didn't do enough to stop it. As a 'reward' for all this, I calibrated #1 overall in my organization, and received yet another HiPo nomination and induction, at the cost of a shattered family life, my health, and a broken team. I don't think I ever felt worse in my entire career. If I could give it all back, I would, in an instant, no questions asked. Physically and mentally, I took about a year to heal."

Think of C.H.I.P as a tablet computer that runs Linux instead of Android, "without the tablet bits," says interviewee Dave, who gave a talk -- which was mostly live demos -- at OSCON 2015. 50,000 C.H.I.P.s have already sold for $9 through their successful Kickstarter campaign, and Next Thing Co. plans to stick with the $9 price for the foreseeable future -- plus add-on boards (that they call "shields") they hope to sell you, but that won't flatten any but the skinniest wallets; given the projected price scale, you'll have trouble spending as much as $50 for a fully-accessorized C.H.I.P. unit.

"But," you may ask, "is C.H.I.P. Open Source?" You bet! No hedging here, just flat-out Open Source, from the bottom to the top, with all software (and hardware specs) freely available via GitHub. And lastly, the "I'll Be Your $9 Computer Today' statement in the headline above is allegorical, not factual. We've seen projected shipping dates for C.H.I.P ranging from "by the end of 2015" to a simple "2016." Either way, we're waiting with bated breath.

Most of us probably won't ever visit the International Space Station (ISS) and look down at the Earth (motto: "The only planet we know has beer, so let's not ruin it"). Looking at pictures and videos made by cameras mounted on the ISS is about as close as we're going to get. There's already an ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment on Ustream, but Urthecast is putting out higher-definition images than what you see on Ustream, and has plans to put out even clearer images and video before long. While Urthecast is likely to accumulate plenty of "oohs" and "aahhs" as it rolls along, according to CEO Scott Larson their real objective is to sell imagery -- and not necessarily just from the visible light band of the overall spectrum -- to industrial and government users. People like us are still invited to look at (and marvel at) lovely images of our planetary home.

NOTE: Today's video is about 4:30 long. If you want to watch and listen to more of Mr. Larson, we have a second "bonus" (Flash) video for you. Or you can read the transcript, which covers both videos.

The example you3dit (You 3D It) person Chris McCoy uses in this video is a prosthetic hand they wanted to make because one of their people lost fingers in a construction accident. Instead of drawing up plans for a new hand, they searched online -- and found enablingthefuture.org, which is all about making 3-D printed prosthetic hands. Using a predesigned hand was obviously much simpler than starting from scratch, and was totally in line with the Open Source "Why reinvent the wheel?" philosophy.

So you3dit helps make 3-D printed items of one sort or another, and can either print them for you at their place or help you find someone local to help with the printing, assuming you can't do it yourself. As you might expect, they did a Kickstarter project. It was for a product called Raver Rings. Unlike many Kickstarter projects we mention on Slashdot, this one didn't fly. In fact, it only got $2,275 in pledges against a $10,000 goal. No matter. There are many other useful things the you3dit community can make -- or help you make -- without Kickstarter.

The OpenDaylight Project works on Software Defined Networking. Their website says, "Software Defined Networking (SDN) separates the control plane from the data plane within the network, allowing the intelligence and state of the network to be managed centrally while abstracting the complexity of the underlying physical network." Another quote: it's the "largest software-defined networking Open Source project to date." The project started in 2013. It now has an impressive group of corporate networking heavyweights as sponsors and about 460 developers working on it. Their latest release, Lithium, came out earlier this month, and development efforts are accelerating, not slowing down, because as cloud use becomes more prevalent, so does SDN, which is an obvious "hand-in-glove" fit for virtualized computing.

Today's interview is with OpenDaylight Project Executive Director Nicolas "Neela" Jacques, who has held this position since the project was not much more than a gleam in (parent) Linux Foundation's eye. This is one of the more important Linux Foundation collaborative software projects, even if it's not as well known to the public as some of the foundation's other efforts, including -- of course -- GNU/Linux itself.

Gobot, it says here, "is a framework for robotics, physical computing, and the Internet of Things, written in the Go programming language." And in today's video, interviewee Adrian Zankich (AKA "Serious Programming Guy at The Hybrid Group") says that an unadorned robot ball -- in this case the Sphero -- is about the least threatening robot you can possibly use to teach entry-level robot programming. Start with Go language? Cylon.js? Use whichever you prefer, Adrian says. Mix and match. It's all fun, and they're both great ways to get into programming for robotics and Internet of Things applications. Open source? You bet. Here's the Hybrid Group's gobot GitHub repository for your perusing pleasure. This (and more) is all in the video, which Tim Lord shot at the recent Solid Conference, where there was a rather high background noise level (but thankfully not high enough to make Adrian hard to understand). And besides the video, there's even more material in the transcript.

An anonymous reader writes: Seasoned Silicon Valley software executive and investor Domenic Merenda has written a love letter to Google, and it's filled with "tough" love. The main thesis is that Google, as a company, should stop making apps, and instead focus on using its enormous data assets to make meaningful connections between people and facilitate organic engagement within a rich ecosystem. Interestingly, the article cites Wikipedia's information that Google maintains over 70 apps on the Android platform alone.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin doesn't use the phrase 'world domination' in these videos, but he could. He lists enough computing niches where GNU/Linux is the major player -- from supercomputers to the next generation of automotive systems -- that with or without world domination, Linux has obviously become an extremely important, widely used operating system that has grown amazingly since Linus Torvalds first shared his humble kernel with the world in 1991. With great popularity has come a great need for people who know how to administer and otherwise work with Linux, so the Linux Foundation is developing new courses in tandem with massive open online course (MOOC) provider edX. Unlike some of the Linux Foundation's previous course offerings, their edX ones are free to audit, and the cost for certification (if you want a cred, not just knowledge) is lower than many IT certification tests and certificates.

These videos (both visible today) were made remotely, with Timothy Lord at one end in Austin, TX, and Jim Zemlin at the other end in Tokyo, Japan. Their sound quality suffers from the distance involved, but they are generally intelligible -- and, of course, you can always choose to read the transcript instead of watching the videos.